The Grill: Fred Brooks

Computerworld - Fred Brooks helped define computer software, in deed as well as word. He served as project manager for, and thus as "father" of, the IBM System/360 and led the design of its operating system. In his classic 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month, he coined Brooks' Law, which states that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." He left IBM in 1964, when the System/360 was introduced, to start the computer science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today, at age 79, he's still teaching and has published a new book, The Design of Design: Essays From a Computer Scientist (Addison-Wesley Professional, April 2010).

You're famous for Brooks' Law, but you also said that when building something, "you should plan to throw one away. You will anyway." That was the first edition of The Mythical Man-Month. In the second edition, I say that was misguided! You ought to plan to continually iterate on it, not just build it, throw it away and start over. Some of the things I said in 1975 were wrong, and in the second edition, I correct them.

In your new book, you draw on your experiences designing things such as a beach house. Are you trying to get people in programming to look beyond software? That's my central thesis. There are these invariants across mediums in which one designs. Let's try to identify these invariants and learn from the older design businesses.

In IT, a long-held belief is that business people don't understand technology and tech people don't understand business. Is that a truism?I don't think it is. It's true that some business people don't understand tech and some tech people have no interest whatsoever in business. But the pointy-headed boss in Dilbert is a caricature. It characterizes some situations where we have bosses running software projects who don't understand what software is about. I think that's no longer the prevailing situation.

You raise the idea of the team vs. the individual designer and how we've shifted toward team design in part because things have become so complex. What about Steve Jobs? Is he an exception to the broader rule you're discussing? He's unquestionably a great designer in that he has the vision of what the product ought to be. [Polaroid founder] Ed Land was the same way. Now, what Land did and what Jobs did is gather a team of people with the various skills to realize the vision. Jobs doesn't do [everything], but he sees the things to be done and casts that vision before a team that can realize it.